mythic

The trail starts in ancient Greece with mythos, a word for speech, tale, or plot. By the 5th century BCE in Athens, mythos could name a story told aloud, not yet a special category of falsehood. Greek writers set it against logos at times, but the contrast was never absolute. The old word kept the sense of uttered narrative close to its core.

From mythos came the adjective mythikos in Greek, meaning belonging to fable or story. Greek learning moved through Hellenistic schools and then into Latin literary culture under the Roman Empire. Latin adopted mythicus, which kept the sense of something pertaining to myth. The form already looked close to the later English adjective.

French carried the inherited learned form as mythique, and English drew on both French and classical models in the modern period. By the early 19th century, English mythic and mythical were both in use. They named what belongs to myth, and soon also what feels grand, legendary, or larger than ordinary life. The word had shifted from classifying tales to describing an atmosphere.

That modern extension is why mythic can describe a god, a hero, a landscape, or even a public reputation. The word still keeps one foot in learned tradition and one in common speech. It is tied to named bodies of story, yet it also points to magnitude and aura. A tale-word became a grandeur-word.